darkSpyro

So, from what I gather, a single person can't choose to take all the money, and thus guarantee his/her own survival with 100% certainty?

Quote: Windumup

Quote: Samius

So, from what I gather, a single person can't choose to take all the money, and thus guarantee his/her own survival with 100% certainty?

Correct

Alright, so here's the deal:
Since you can't be 100% certain of saving your own life in any case, you have to go by probabilities. Obviously you always know what you're going to choose yourself, but the other three people and their binary choices effectively create 8 different "sets" of choices. These sets represent all the possible ways the situation can unfold.

If you don't take the money, your only way of staying alive is that nobody else takes it either.
That's a 1 in 8 chance for staying alive.

If you do take the money, your only way of dying is that everybody else takes it also.
That's a 7 in 8 chance for staying alive. Obviously this means that taking the money is the smarter choice.

Someone could give me the "But what if everyone thought the same way?"-argument, but even then I'd be more willing to assume that somebody in the group was benevolent enough to not take the money, than I would be to assume that nobody in the group was self-preserving enough to take it.

So yeah. I'd take the money. Not for the value of the money itself, but for the fact that I really don't want to die due to some ****** up game that someone forced me to play for whatever reason.